There was some good news last week. While Washington was busy holding the global markets hostage and placing billions in badly needed R&D funding on the chopping block, a new report from REN21 (the Renewable Energy Network for the 21st Century) showed that global investments in renewable energy jumped 32 percent to a record $211 billion, […]

South Africa’s Department of Water Affairs has launched a new web-based tool where the public can view their municipality’s water score card (example below) MY WATER Welcome to my water search page. Find out the Drinking Water Quality in your area. Enter a town and/or suburb and/or street and click GO! Excellent Acceptable Need […]

Banking giant Nedbank’s insurance division, Nedgroup Insurance, has launched a pilot project allowing its home-owner clients to install solar geysers as replacements when existing geysers burst or malfunction. Nedgroup said the project would assist its clients in reducing their electricity consumption and thus their household running costs, while also easing the burden on the national […]

Based on nature’s own recycling process, this human waste-disposal system is inexpensive, waterless and a portable compost heap in a bucket. The ‘Jenkins’ humanure toilet is a simple plywood box with ProNature natural varnish. On top is a conventional wooden toilet seat that fits over the top of a bucket. Now you can do your […]

Water is the most common substance on the planet yet it has some very unusual characteristics. Pure water is odourless and tasteless. Water has a very simple atomic structure; water is composed of two elements, hydrogen and oxygen- making it a compound. Pure water has a neutral pH of 7, which is neither acidic or […]

Authorities from the Northern Cape have expressed their concern about the environmental impacts of often illicit alluvial diamond mining along the Lower Vaal River. Due to the meandering nature of the Vaal River, diamonds are found both in the river channels and on the floodplains where the river once ran. The deposits are actively mined […]

Mass deaths of bee colonies in many parts of the world may be part of a wider, hidden threat to wild insect pollinators vital to human food supplies, a U.N. study indicated on Thursday. Declines in flowering plants, a spread of parasites, use of pesticides or air pollution were among more than a dozen factors […]

Climate change is probably the world’s biggest distraction and not its biggest and most immediate challenge, which belongs to clean water, says Professor Grant Cawthorn. Cawthorn, Wits University’s School of Geosciences Platinum Industry Igneous Petrology professor, contends that the lack of fresh water will have a much greater global impact than a “one or two […]

Many farmers in developing nations can double food production within a decade by shifting to ecological agriculture from use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, a U.N. report showed on Tuesday. Insect-trapping plants in Kenya and Bangladesh’s use of ducks to eat weeds in rice paddies are among examples of steps taken to increase food for […]